TUNER : This one uses 5 to 7 watt when turned on, and 3 watt when turned off.

To put it in a nice table for easy comparision:
The HTPC uses about 50% of a normal pc, but it uses 10 times as much as my previous tuner. A CRT (+ speaker) would need the same amount of energy as my current TV, but an LCD would be cheaper (in energy usage).

XBMC offers native MythTV support from Revision 12173. It’s still pretty beta, but (in my eyes) it’s still working better than the python scripts.

The HOWTO
Add MythTV as a Video Source

1. Once XBMC is installed and running on your Xbox go to “Videos” and select “Add Source”

2. In the “Enter the paths or browse for the media locations.” field you will need to enter the properly formatted username, password, and IP information for your mythconverg database. This information should be prefixed with “myth://” and follow standard linux network access formatting of: “username:password@ipaddress”. For example, if your mythconverg database is located on a machine whose ip address is 192.168.1.116 and uses the username “mythtv” and the password “mythtv” you should enter the following:

myth://mythtv:mythtv@192.168.1.116

3. Input a name for this source in the “Enter a name for this Media Source” field. This name is what will appear in the “Videos” list of XBMC.

4. Click on “OK” to add this source to the “Videos” list.

The ISSUE
The issue that I had was that my XBOX froze after selecting a channel. It was caused because my MythTV backend returned it’s hostname to the XBOX, which was unable to resolve (DNS) it. So I gave my backend a fully qualified dns name, which was resolvable and the issue was fixed. From now on, I reused my old XBOX (which was turning into a dust collector).

But to show you that it isn’t really that hard to fake, check out this article! Which will show you that copying a fingerprint is about that easy than what they do in “CSI [insert city name here]” to retrieve them … 😉

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Being “Green” is being helpful towards the environment, but also to your electricity bills… The most commonly used techniques to reduce the power usage of a computer device are :

Turning off your monitor/screen/tv when not used.

Turning off the hard disks when they aren’t used

CPU Frequency Scaling

For the last bit, you’ll have to check if you motherboard/cpu supports this… Most will probably support this, apart from the “really” old. The motherboard (& CPU) of my HTPC (MythTV) is capable of using AMD’s Cool’n’Quiet. I followed the following guide on the Ubuntu Forum, and used the “powersave” algorithm. It reduced my CPU frequency to 1000, where I must admit that I don’t notice anything on my combined MythTV frontend/backend. Next up is measuring the actual power usage, but I need to obtain a measuring device for that… 😉

After thrashing MythTV in an earlier post of mine, I came to fall back to it… One of the main requirements I had was to be able to stream TV to multiple clients across my home, yet the TV-Server component of Team Mediaportal proved unstable as hell to me. I was unable to view channels I was capable of viewing in the standalone version. I switched to SageTV for a few days, where I must say that this software proved that installing a media center can be “easy”. Yet it lacked some smaller features, required licenses for the base & every extender… which became a big “turnoff”. 😉

Up in the Clouds

Views are my own

The content of this blog will, at all times, portray my own views. At no time will this reflect the views of the organization I am linked to. Neither can the information provided be used as support statement.